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Steam to introduce 'donate' button after paid mods backpedal

Valve's bold plan to introduce paid mods in the Steam Workshop has crumbled after less than a week.

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After an incredibly negative reception from players following the launch of monetised Skyrim mods, the PC gaming giant has bowed to pressure and removed the feature. Anyone who has spent money on the content will be refunded. "Our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities," Valve said in its announcement. "We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it."

Valve also owned up to misreading the market and the gaming community, adding "We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."

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Skyrim's publisher, Bethesda, also chimed in on the reversal. In an update to its original paid mods announcement, it simply says "After discussion with Valve, and listening to our community, paid mods are being removed from Steam Workshop. Even though we had the best intentions, the feedback has been clear -- this is not a feature you want. Your support means everything to us, and we hear you."

It's almost impressive how vociferously the community rejected the idea of paid mods. A Change.org petition gathered over 133,000 signatures in the wake of Valve's initial announcement, all calling for an end to the rollout. Valve founder Gabe Newell even took to Reddit to answer questions on the controversial topic.

Common complaints included the steep cuts taken from sales (mod makers only received 25 percent of an item's selling price, in the case of Skyrim), fears of DRM being introduced on the mod platform, and a lack of communication with players from the offset. Some Steam users were also seeing their accounts banned from community forums for speaking up against the paid mods, to which Newell responded "if we are censoring, it's dumb, ineffective, and will stop". A darker side of the backlash has been aimed at the modders themselves, with several receiving death threats for participating in the paid model.

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However, the reversal may not be as complete as it appears -- at least, not eventually. "We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop", Valve's statement pointedly begins, emphasis ours. The plan was originally to allow paid content for other games in future, with Valve's original announcement saying "many more of your favorite Workshop games will support paid content in the coming weeks". The fate of paid mods for other titles appears unclear, though with the reaction Elder Scrolls has seen, it's unlikely any other publisher would want to get involved until the whole scheme has been overhauled.

There is one glimmer of hope for mod makers who were hoping to make at least a partial living from their creations. Buried in his Reddit session, Newell confirms "We are adding a pay what you want button where the mod author can set the starting amount wherever they want." This includes zero, so free mods won't be going anywhere. There isn't any sign of a date on this "donate" button but it's good to know there will still be avenue for players to reward creators in future, in a way that won't involve, as Newell so elegantly says, pissing off the internet.